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 PrintableVersion Letter from AmericaWhat price celebrity?A new list of the top ten highest paid Hollywood stars has recently been posted. Julia Roberts tops the bill earning a massive $10 million per film. Ex-Friends star Jennifer Aniston comes in last at a measly $9 million a movie (poor thing). Statistics are notoriously unpredictable because their seeming precision belies a host of assumptions. Nonetheless these numbers above are pretty straightforward. They give me something of a shudder when I compare them to another statistic someone reported to me the other day: every minute 6,000 people die of hunger. InequitiesWhat kind of world do we live in where in one corner of the globe someone can rake in enough profits over the glossy lengths of a Hollywood blockbuster to compare with the Gross Domestic Product of a small country, while elsewhere people starve for want of a dry husk? Christians have long realised that their theology of the fall plays out in such concrete ways. We no longer live in the garden. Paradise is long since past. We expect to see gross inequities, sordid crimes, and immorality of a respectable but nonetheless callous (sometimes cowardly) sort. Whether, though, it is the diminished communication gaps that separate us all these days, or may it be the devastating effects of generations of rape and pillage of the soil, our world appears to be only getting more unjust. After who?By all reports, Julia Roberts is a perfectly lovely individual (at least that’s what they tell me in the magazine racks at the checkout), and I have nothing personally against Jennifer Aniston. Yet the sin of self-idolatry is surely broadcast when those we pay to visualise our own narcissistic ideals acclaim such stupendous rewards, while those who give us nothing literally die. It would be tempting as a self-righteous foreigner to point the finger at American individualism and commercialism as the culprit (I heard someone the other day joke that the English ubiquitous ‘after you’ stereotypical politeness is the American ‘after me’ equivalent). Certainly, American culture celebrates the individual, the famous, and the wealthy in a way different from other countries. While Americans are fantastically generous towards their own disaster areas (such as Katrina), historically they have played less of an active part in foreign aid, though that may be changing, and even the lower proportion tends to be numerically larger than other nations’ relative widow’s mite. Desires writ largeYet it is not really an American problem for, after all, Hollywood stars can command such fees because at least in part their names are as well known in London as Los Angeles. We all pay the piper. The tune of hoarding resources is the collective responsibility of the race of Adam and Eve, not that of a particular state. Woody Allen famously quipped that in the future we would all be famous for five minutes. The culture of reality TV may be a partial fulfilment of his secular prophecy. More to the point the rich and famous are our desires writ large. It’s not a pretty picture. Despite this grim magnification of our fallen narcissism, though, there is another side to things. While our human nature is in every respect thoroughly depraved, the very twistedness of our desires betrays their original intention, much like a garbled picture on a TV screen gives you a hint of how things should work if the reception was clear. We desire a celebrity. We desire a hero. We desire worship. And, as Jesus taught, it is only as we paradoxically deny the selfishness of the self that we will find the fulfilment of the image of God in the self’s worship of its true Master. Jesus is more than a celebrity but he’s no less than the Christ. The price we know. Josh Moody.
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